Personas
B2B buyer personas are not a card with a made-up name and stock photo. They're the tool preventing the team from building a product or message for an imaginary customer instead of the real one paying the invoices.
“A buyer persona built without interviewing a single real customer isn't a persona. It's the marketing team's opinion with a proper name.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy more than one persona is needed for complex deals
In an enterprise sale, different roles evaluate the purchase with completely different criteria: the economic buyer focuses on ROI and risk, the technical user on ease of use and integration, the internal influencer on how the choice impacts their daily work. A single generic persona doesn't capture this variety and leads to messages speaking to nobody in particular.
Building distinct personas by role, based on direct interviews with real customers holding those roles, allows calibrating specific messages and materials for each stakeholder involved in the decision.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: building buyer personas based on internal marketing team hypotheses instead of direct interviews with real customers, getting a profile reflecting internal biases more than market reality.
Second mistake: using a single generic persona for an enterprise sales cycle involving multiple stakeholders with very different decision criteria, losing the ability to calibrate specific messages for each role.
Practical Application
A company builds 3 distinct personas (CFO as economic buyer, IT manager as technical user, team lead as influencer) based on 24 direct interviews with existing customers in those roles. Calibrating specific sales materials for each persona instead of a single generic message, the proposal-to-closed-deal conversion rate rises from 19% to 33% over the following six months.